Stalker Girl (24 page)

When they turned and started walking east, Carly thought it was funny. But Jess, smart, nice seven-year-old city girl that she was, ran after them to correct their mistake. Their destination, that holy shrine of fashion, was one block west.

Jess returned to her sister’s side aglow with the satisfaction of her good deed.

“You know what your problem is, Jess? You’re too nice.”

“That is not a problem. You can’t be too nice. That’s like being too good or too smart.”

“You might want to reconsider that position when you’re a little older. I would have just let those two clomp all the way to the East River.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I can’t stand those people.”

“You don’t even know those people! You don’t even know their
names
, Carly. How can you know you don’t like them?”

“Oh, I know. Trust me. And someday you’re going to, too.”

“I hope not. I hope I’m not going to hate people I don’t even know. Why are you in such a bad mood?”

“Me? ”

“You should cheer up. It’s going to be fun tonight. Like a sleepover. Only it isn’t, because I live there—sort of—and you used to, and we’re related.”

“Yeah, so what is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s too complicated.” Jess stayed quiet until they arrived at Nick’s building. Then, as Carly put her key into the outside lock, Jess said, “I wish we still lived here.”

“Tell me about it. At least you’re here half the time.”

When the lock buzzed, Jess pulled the door open. “I mean all of us. All the time. I don’t like doing half and half. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don’t know which bed I’m in. Then I keep my eyes closed on purpose and try to figure it out from the sounds. If Mom’s snoring, or too close to me, it’s easy.”

“That’s good. So you make a game out of it.” Carly pushed the button for the elevator and leaned against the wall while it clanged its way down to the lobby.

“Yeah. I guess. It’s not the funnest game, though.”

 

The studio was empty. Nick had left a note saying he’d be back soon. Jess ran to her room to play on her computer while Carly took her first cautious steps into her former home.

Things looked pretty much the same in the big central room. Carly spent a few minutes staring out at the view before moving on to the kitchen.

At first she couldn’t tell what was different. Then she noticed the shiny copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above the stove. A row of French cookbooks was lined up along the counter next to the stove. One of them,
La Cuisine Végétarienne
, lay faceup.

She wasn’t planning to look in the room formerly known as her mother and Nick’s, but the door was wide open. She not only looked, but took a few steps into the room. The king-sized bed had a new, expensive-looking comforter: deep ruby red, with a pattern of gold circles and squares woven in. On top of that was a small mountain of red and gold throw pillows. A half-empty pump bottle of lotion sat on the nightstand on what used to be her mother’s side of the bed, along with a pile of books.

Despite these signs of change, nothing prepared her for what she found when she opened the door to her room.

Only the view was the same. The bed had been pushed back into a corner. A bunch of cardboard boxes—some open with rolls of paper sticking out, some sealed with packing tape—sat on top of the now-bare mattress. Several big plastic jugs, filled with what looked like paint, sat on the desk. Next to the desk, under the window where her bed used to be, was some kind of old-fashioned machine. It had wrought-iron legs and what looked like a steering wheel on one side. Next to the machine, lit by late-afternoon sun, was a long folding table covered with cards of assorted colors, arranged in a neat row. On each card was the same poem, but each version was in a different font and different color ink. She picked one up just as Nick walked into the room.

“Here you are. I’m sorry I was out. I was going to—”

“What is all this?”

“Chantal had to move out of her studio.” Nick walked over to Carly and put a hand on her shoulder. “It happened pretty suddenly. They sold the building and offered everyone cash, and—”

“Oh,” Carly said. Over Nick’s shoulder she saw a flock of geese heading upriver.

“I’m sorry. I should have warned you.”

“Why?” She shrugged and pretended not to care. “It’s your place. I can’t expect you to keep it like a museum. ‘Carly Finnegan slept here.’” She took a step toward the machine-thing. “You haven’t answered my question. What is this?”

“It’s an antique letterpress.” He picked up one of the poems and held it up for her inspection. “You can simulate this with computers, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the real thing. Each letter is done individually—and backward. Here, feel it.”

Carly ran her finger over the words. “Tie Your Heart at Night to Mine, Love.” The thick paper felt rough against her skin. Each letter formed its own indentation. “Mmm” was all she could manage to get out.

“It’s a dying art.” Nick laid the poem down on the table and straightened the row. “This couple is driving Chantal crazy. It’s for their wedding. They wanted to see the poem in every font she had, in every possible combination of ink and paper. It’s incredibly labor-intensive. Each one of these letters is made with a lead slug, which she arranges by hand. Then she rolls each piece through one at a time.”

“Uh-huh.” Carly had nothing against Chantal, but she just couldn’t join Nick in his indignation on her behalf. Was she living here? Or just working here? Where was she now? Was Chantal part of the pizza-and-sleepover plan?

“I meant to clear this off before you got here.” He walked to the bed and picked up one of the boxes.

“It’s okay, Nick. I’ll sleep in Jess’s room.”

“No. No. We can clear this stuff off.” He picked up another box and carried it to the corner where he’d started to stack them.

“Really. It’s okay.” It wasn’t okay, but moving the boxes from the bed to the floor wasn’t going to make it okay. Nothing she could think of—short of traveling back in time—was going to make anything okay. But she let Nick make himself feel better by clearing off the bed that wasn’t hers anymore. She stood at the table in front of the window and watched a tour boat circle the lit-up Statue of Liberty.

A piece of paper from one of the boxes fell to the floor at her feet. She reached down to pick it up. She was barely looking at the thing, but two words leapt out:
Monroe
and
Gallery
.

It was a listing of November openings printed out from
artdealers.org
. Chantal—or someone—had circled a few of the others with a thick red marker, but not the one that caught Carly’s eye.

 

 

It was strange to think about, but if that piece of paper hadn’t fallen at her feet at that moment, she probably wouldn’t be sitting around the Babcock & Whitman, Attorneys-at-Law, Specialists in Criminal Defense table with four sets of eyes focused so intently on her.

 

A couple hours after the gallery listings fell at her feet, Carly found herself standing on the steps of the apartment building across the street from the Monroe Gallery. One large spot-lit painting hung in the gallery’s window. In front of that, a small crowd milled around on the sidewalk, talking, smoking, and giving each other the once-over, trying to figure out who mattered, whose names would appear in write-ups of the event. Each time a cab (or in one case a Town Car) pulled up to the curb, all eyes would be on the passenger door, waiting to see who emerged.

 

She’d left the apartment saying she needed a little time to herself. She knew it was going to be hard going back to the loft. And she knew “her” room was never going to be hers anymore. But seeing it taken over like that was a lot harder than she’d anticipated. She assured Nick that she was fine. A brisk walk in the cold would do her good. Maybe she’d give Val a call. Things weren’t exactly back to how they used to be between them. How could they be when Carly was hiding so much? But this topic was safe. Val knew how hard it had been to move away from Nick’s, how upset she’d been when he and her mother broke up. Val would know what to say.

But Val’s phone must have been off. Carly tried three times, and each time it went straight to voice mail.

So Carly walked. In the direction of the Monroe Gallery. She told herself she was just going to pass by. Maybe look in the windows and check out the art. See how big a crowd they got for their openings. For curiosity’s sake.

But that’s not what happened. Instead of passing by, she planted herself on the steps of a small apartment building across the street from the brownstone and gallery for a good five or ten minutes, staring up at the second-floor windows, where lights were going on and off and shadows were flitting across rooms. According to that
Times
piece she’d read, the Deen brownstone had six thousand square feet of living space in the four floors above the gallery. That would be a lot of space anywhere, but in New York City it was downright palatial. As far as Carly knew—and she knew pretty much everything in the public record—Taylor didn’t have any siblings. So for each member of this family of three, there was the equivalent of a good-sized apartment’s worth of square footage.

She wondered which of the windows were Taylor’s. For some reason—maybe because it was thirty degrees out and she’d left without a hat or gloves—she pictured a huge room with a stone fireplace complete with roaring fire. Was Taylor in there now? Did that hand, pulling that curtain closed, belong to her?

A few people who lived in the building passed by on their way in or out. Most ignored Carly. Some gave her long, hard stares as they passed her on the steps. When an old woman pushing a shopping cart piled high with clanking bottles and cans down the sidewalk stopped to tell her, “They got free soup at Saint Mark’s Church tonight,” she decided she wouldn’t ignore this obvious IM from the universe.

It was time to go.

The walk downtown and that little bit of harmless people-watching had calmed her down enough that she felt she could go back to Nick’s and participate in the movie night Jess and Nick had planned without sulking. Sleeping in Jess’s room wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, it was pretty awful to see what had once been her space invaded by Chantal, but that room wouldn’t have been hers forever. She’d have other rooms of her own. A dorm, next year, to start. And others after that.

That’s how close Carly came to saving herself from all the trouble contained in that file folder.

She glanced across the street for one last look just as the front door of the main residence, one floor above the gallery, opened and Taylor walked out. She was with two friends. All three seemed to be talking at once as they traipsed down the stairs, linked arms, and headed up West Fourth Street.

Carly watched for a while, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t consider following Taylor again. She knew Brian was on the road. Probably up in Canada by now, according to the tour itinerary they’d posted. What would a girl like Taylor do on a Friday night when her boyfriend was out of town?

Carly was proud of herself when she decided against it.

And then the next thing she knew, she found herself walking across the street and pulling open the heavy glass door of the Monroe Gallery.

Found herself?

Yes. Found herself. As much as she had tried, in the days that had elapsed since, to locate the point in time where she made the fateful decision to enter the gallery, she couldn’t. She knew full well that she had made a choice to do what she did, to go where she’d gone. She had only herself to blame. But she could not recall making the decision. One minute she was averting catastrophe, heading back to her life—such as it was. And the next she was creating catastrophe.

She felt a jolt of alarm when she saw the uniformed guard standing next to the reception desk. But he smiled and nodded at her, like she was just one of the crowd. And so Carly walked on, trying to look like she belonged there as much as anyone did.

A waitress in a white shirt and black bow tie offered cheese-stuffed mushrooms. Carly was too nervous to eat, but when a waiter came by seconds later with a tray of plastic champagne flutes, she took one and downed it. The bubbles tickled her nose, and as she swallowed, she felt the warmth travel down her throat, across her chest, and right up to her head.

She made her way to the back of the room, where a huge painting illuminated from above and below had the whole wall to itself. On her way, she met the champagne-carrying waiter again and exchanged her empty plastic flute for a full one.